Description

If you have any suggestions for improvements for the next hackathon or another technical event please record them here. Organizers and participants are welcome to contribute to this task. We want to improve!! :)

You could use a little game/ceremony to match people after the opening, if you don't do that already.
Related: looks like the mentoring system is using t-shirts. Then you probably don't need the dyno/baby dyno stickers, which were meant to signal whether one is experienced vs newbie, unless you're using that outside the "buddies" project, that is.

Not a very intense task, but time consuming as it has to be done constantly/ latently, and organizing team involved in program will most likely have no time.
Could be done by a volunteer who is into media!

Because I don't know how to adult and look after myself... I've managed to give myself quite bad back pain over the weekend from being hunched over a laptop. This isn't good for driving and having to look over your shoulder etc

@Quiddity gave me an exercise/stretch sheet on Monday when it started, which does help a bit.

I'm already susceptible to this, and usually a trip to the osteopath usually quickly solves this. Luckily, my transit hotel heading north has a sauna. Which helped last night, but it's not good again this morning.

From comments made by a couple of other people, I know I'm not the only one

I'm honestly not sure how you can solve/prevent this at a hackathon. Obviously, we can't have proper chairs and desks for everyone

Just remind people to stretch, move around and sit properly?

Could we have a session or two from someone about this? Telling people about ergonomics? Does the WMF have someone on staff with this knowledge?

Something to elevate laptops to a better working height? (Also remind people to bring keyboards/mice to use?)

Or even have someone to do short massages or similar? (Noting, I would pay for this if it was offered)

A question that I have after hearing Chris' report. Is it really necessary to have a 1:1 buddy system? Maybe experienced people could even "look after" 2 newbies instead?

Not sure where to find "Chris' report" and I am not aware of a 1:1 buddy system...
There were mentors (maybe that is meant?), and iirc we had more mentors than newcomers interested in getting mentored. :)

Closing this task - hackathon is over, this task will be linked from hackathon documentation and relevant ideas are carried over to Wikimania Hack.
Thank you to everyone who contributed to this task! :)